David Sticher

Vamp is a curious lost little lamb from the 1980's, all lit in bizarre green and purple tones and featuring all manner of Grace Jones wiggling around like a monster. It's a fun ride, cleverly done and not entirely unoriginal, with terrific acting talent and a loopy sense of humor pitched somewhere between After Hours and a sideways college comedy. Another aspect I appreciated was how each vampire had a personality, and they weren't always one hundred percent proud to be vampires. They're very aware that in a lot of ways they're perfectly lame. Fairly cool stuff, especially in the confrontation between a character who "turns" and the protagonist.

On the other hand, the last half lacks the zip and zap of the first and some characters seemed a little undernourished. The geek who owns the car seemed a little extraneous towards the end, and the albino gang, while sort of awesome, didn't really belong.

But either way. If you're interested in an offbeat 80's vampire movie or just seeing Grace Jones scare the s**t out of you with her face, by all means rent Vamp. You will become a much wiser person as a result and your parents will no longer hate you.

This is a fantastic cat-and-mouse thriller that delivers with the sort

of steely, intelligent gusto not seen since DePalma and Polanski's

great work of the 70's. This movie is chilling, smart, formidably

acted, directed with muscle, and above all else entertaining, a

corker and a half of a popcorn flick.

What's more, while "Panic Room" is primarily a ripping action yarn,

it also happens to possess a significant amount of weight as a

multifacted satire of class, security, family, and surveillance. This

element is delicate and subtle, just as the social commentary was

in Fincher's not altogether dissimilar "The Game," but it is sincere

and effective without ever overwhelming the fascinating plot or -

more importantly - the tension at large. Keep your eyes open -

Fincher isn't simply an empty stylist, but as he's proven in all of his

films to date, he's a keen observer and possessed of a sly, dark

wit that goes beyond his camera pyrotechnics.

But I'm reading too much into it already, or at least missing the

point of its real qualities - the fact that it more or less kicks ass.

Suffice it to say, "Panic Room" is a great ride, and highly

recommended to anyone looking for a genuinely tense and

exciting thriller.

In "Trois huit," wildly implausible set-ups lurch clumsily into individual scenes of significant power and thought, causing much head scratching and hand wringing during its running time, but after you think about it for a while it begins to add up. It's a film that you only really appreciate in retrospect. The plot is a frustration of pure contrivance, but it's worth sifting through for what's in between the lines, a seasoned exploration of the complicated psychological relationship between a bully and his victim.

It isn't often that strong direction and acting can redeem a truly problematic script, but such is the case here. I can't honestly recommend it to casual fans of psychological thrillers, but to people in search of something slightly different and quite a bit more thoughtful than usual American fare, it's a fine little time.